Observations on economics, the academy, the wider world, and things that run on rails.

17.3.15

I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

Wisconsin state representative John Jagler (R-Watertown) introduces a bill requiring the state universities of Wisconsin to identify the high schools from which students requiring remedial courses graduated, with counts of students from those schools. His motive appears to be to help parents identify weak high school systems. The editorial board of Racine's Journal-Timesendorses.

With all the talk of school accountability, this is one basic measure to show how schools are doing. When these reports come out they should recorded as a percentage of students, not strictly a number because obviously larger schools will have more students that need remedial courses simply because of population.

Approximately 20 to 30 percent of students need remediation, according to minutes from a December 2013 Board of Regents meeting. It’s in line with national standards, according to the minutes, but still concerning.

Yes, regular readers might recall seeing this idea nearly ten years ago. Sage say "if you sit by the river long enough, the corpses of your adversaries will float past you."

And I continue to suspect that such reports will surprise people. I was unable in a few minutes running the search engine to find how much greater the proportion of twentieth percentile graduates of high schools in wealthy districts who start college is than the proportion of eightieth percentile graduates of high schools in poor districts who do so: this Forbes essay alludes to that phenomenon.

In a world where a Hartland Arrowhead High follows up on its $600K locker room by building new soccer practice fields, and as an austerity measure, only one of those fields rates artificial turf, it might concentrate a few minds to see how many of those students wind up in MATH 099 (or whatever the University of Wisconsin system refers to its junior-high arithmetic course as these days) and it would be delicious to see the district be presented a bill, in the Tennessee fashion, for those services.